[MD] The SOM/MOQ discrepancy.

[Platt Holden]

Hi Ham, 

[Platt] 
> > Seems to me if there's an "anguish" around here it's your continual
> > frustration with premises of the MOQ. If you want to stick with
> > SOM as the one right worldview, no one objects, least of all
> > Pirsig himself:

{ham] 
> What frustrates me is the inability of sophisticated intellectuals to
> accept 
> experienced reality as a fundamental duality.

I guess what frustrates us MOQ'ers is your inability to accept experienced 
reality as being Quality prior to any fundamental dualities created by 
thought.

> Not that they don't 
> understand the principle (it's self-evident), but that they reject it 
> because a duality implies SOM, which their master has decreed as 
> "low-quality" static thinking.  This is not a matter of a "right" or
> "wrong" 
> worldview, Platt.  S/O reality is -- always has been -- the worldview of
> human experience.

I doubt if that's true, but hard to prove one way or another. In any case, 
no one is saying that thinking's S/O division of experience isn't useful. 
Just that the DQ/SQ division is better.

> To wish it away, or pretend that it's a tetrology of 
> levels, is akin to imagining a band of archangels circling our planet. 
> That's not intuitive insight or even intellectual reasoning; it's poetic
> license.

Relying on Pirsig's evolutionary moral levels as a way of organizing your 
thoughts gives you a lot more understanding of reality than is possible by 
imagining archangels circling the planet.  

[Pirsig]
> > "Or, using another analogy, saying that a Metaphysics of Quality
> > is false and a subject-object metaphysics is true is like saying that
> > rectangular coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false.
> > A map with the North Pole at the center is confusing at first, but
> > it's every bit as correct as a Mercator map. In the Arctic it's the
> > only map to have.  Both are simply intellectual patterns for
> > interpreting reality and one can only say that in some circumstances
> > rectangular coordinates provide a better, simpler interpretation."
> (Lila, 
> > 8)

[Ham] 
> While they may be adequate for local navigation purposes, all 
> two-dimensional maps are misrepresentations.  By projecting the lines of
> longitude and latitude as equal, Mercator maps show Greenland as large as
> South America, for example.  The most accurate maps for land masses are 
> split curvature projections that make the earth look like a peeled orange
> skin.  Only a 3-dimensional globe can represent the earth and its
> continents 
> in their proper relationships.
> 
> Anyway, Pirsig's analogy isn't really relevant because we're not talking
> about a true-or-false premise.  The amount of distortion on a map is a 
> relative issue.  No one here (least of all me) insists that the Quality 
> concept is false or that subject-object experience is true.  I do question
> whether either of these perspectives can legitimately be called a 
> "metaphysics", but I don't deny their validity.  My argument is that 
> one-dimensional man cannot experience absolute reality, but only its
> value.

Pirsig's argument is that absolute reality is everyday experience.

[Platt]
> > But I venture to say that most of here believe that SOM
> > comes a cropper when trying to explain the worth of anything
> > including pennies, piggy banks and intellectual processes.
> > Because when you come right down to it, worth (value) isn't
> > just a sometime thing.  It's the whole thing.  No matter how
> > you try, you can't escape it.  It's real before anything else is
> > real including, and most importantly, one's thoughts about
> > what is real. That's why I and others hold it to be a better
> > metaphysics than others we know.
> 
> I don't dispute the significance of Value, Platt.  In fact, I'm all for
> it. 
> As you must know by now, Essentialism is a valuistic philosophy.  But
> Pirsig 
> places his Quality (Value) outside the levels box where it can't be
> defined 
> or connected to the experienced world of "static patterns", except by
> doing 
> intellectual handstands.  How does this four-level hierarchy make Value 
> immanent in our lives and help us realize it?

Quality (Value) comes prior to any division or any hierarchy and is 
"realized" every waking moment. But, as long as thinking requires patterns 
for meaning, it requires divisions, hierarchies and other intellectual 
structures. Pirsig has given us the division of DQ/SQ and the value levels 
to make reality more intellectually meaningful than ever before.   
 
> Differentiated existence is the intellectualization of experience. 
> Experience is the realization of value by a being-aware.  Being-aware is
> an 
> individuated dichotomy that is rooted to the metaphysical separation of 
> otherness from sensibility.  Experiential reality isn't a handful of
> levels 
> and patterns.  It's difference and contrariety in an infinite range of 
> possibilities which we only apprehend as objects and events in space and
> time.

In my book, Pirsig's metaphysical structure provides greater meaning and 
understanding than your structure. But, your binding of value and 
experience together holds out hope that you will be enlightened. :-) 

With Holiday greetings,
Platt